The Unseen Here and
Now . . .
Stuart
Revercomb
Stuart
Revercomb is a marketing consultant and joyously married father of four
children. He seems to remember someone once telling him he ought to be
a writer. "The Unseen Here and Now" -- Thursdays.
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"Thursday's Fare"
DEC. 2, 1999
Too Many Towers
What is it with towers anyways? As a species we've never handled towers very well. Maybe it's a heretofore unknown part of the curse associated with our self-serving attempt to build the Tower of Babel. The writers of Genesis clearly left out part of Chapter 7 as God prepared to scatter us to the four corners of the globe, unable to speak in a common tongue. It likely should have read:
"Come let Us go down and there confuse their language that they may not understand each others' speech ... and furthermore let them never attempt to build another tower as well ... Whew! I mean that thing is Ugly!"
We got the language thing back pretty well, but we still haven't figured out where and when and if at all to build a tower. In 1174 the Italians built a pretty good one in Pisa that still stands, albeit with a slight list to starboard. The Space Needle in Seattle is pretty cool, as long as you don't LIVE there. And we have our own famous tower in Roanoke that's in the shape of a star. People have been loving or cursing it now on 50 years. Maybe that's where we should have called it quits.
The cell phone tower is, of course, the modern day "Tower of Babel," designed by engineers to carry a countless cacophony of critical conversations among us. It is a little known fact but cell phone tower engineers are extremely proud of their modern-day cutting edge tower design and have negotiated placement incentives with the majority of cell carriers in America. The more you place in the middle of scenic byways the better. Rebates are offered in Southwest Virginia where 27 towers were constructed in one man's back yard and were later mistaken for a regional substation by American Electric Power, which immediately submitted a request to hook it to a power plant located in Kentucky.
One of my least favorites is about a mile from my home. It is lined up with a heavily traveled road so that as my fellow travelers and I begin to come up over a rise and our eyes just begin to appreciate the splendor that would have been autumn in the Blue Ridge, we are treated to a spiny apparition that juts cold and gray and callous into the once expansive horizon. By the time our third view of the morning is taken up with the random steel poles the "I don't give a damn either" part of our nature is likely working its way to the front of our beings. By lunch, many of us are almost willing to sell our souls and lease our own back lots to the highest cellular bidder.
I have had my cell phone, also known in our house as the "Long Distance Baby Monitor," for five years and what strikes me as a bit peculiar is that no matter how many of these towers take root, the little bars in my liquid crystal display never seem to indicate any improvement in reception. Perhaps they are allowed to reproduce like the proverbial rabbit in order to accommodate new users. But if that's the case, why not just add a couple more of those tubular pod things at the top? No need for a whole new tower in a whole new location, is there?
Maybe there is a lesson or two for American Electric Power here as well. Could five years of economic and environmental controversy be ended by simply running the additional lines from West Virginia to Montvale by the existing pathway? Why create a new one? Perhaps the amount of electrical field generated by the additional wires would pass some federal limit established back in the 1960s.
As bad as cell phone tower proliferation, at least when the sun is down far enough so that you can no longer see all 278 of them protruding from the valley floor like the craggy spikes of a cancer cell, is the loss of the red lights on top of the towers at "Towers Mall." Up until about 3 years ago they were the old style: slowly coming up to a red glow and then fading back again over the course of 4 or 5 seconds. They were warm and affectionate somehow -- welcoming even, as you approached the city on land or in the air from almost any direction. Viewed from a mountaintop at night they would give you a moment of perspective and beckon you to return home to the valley below.
In a fit of modernization they were replaced by staccato white strobes that offer none of the comfort of the old ones. In fact, they even play tricks on your eyes. As you turn your head from one side to the other they leave false images on the back of the retina indicating more lights and flashes than there really are. "Modernized," to be sure. To the best of my recollection they were "upgraded" by the owners of the mall not because they posed any danger of failing or sufficiently meeting code, but because the old ones were, well, getting old. So am I but I know a bad deal when I see one.
Here, you can have my cell phone back. Give me back my mountains.